I was recently struck, like knocked to my knees, by a quote of George Saunders’. Asked of the pressure of raising kids in our society, where desire to give them the world and to keep up with the Joneses butts up against reality, Saunders noted, “Materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.”

“Materialism is the only game in town.”

Saunders was being interviewed w/r/t his new book of short stories, Tenth of December. The centerpiece is a story called “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” in which a family attempts to leap from middling- to upper-middle class by engaging in the common practice of hanging live young girls from the third world by their heads in the front yard as decoration. The point of the story is that we have massive moral blind spots when something becomes the only game in town…